Hi!
> One such standard is the Posix one. But just because something is
> standardized doesn't necessarily make it particularly portable.
>
AFAIK all the main platforms have at least some degree of POSIX support.
IMHO it was somewhat of a lost opportunity for X3J3 (now J3 right?)
committee to drop the effort to standardize a Fortran 90 binding to
POSIX (1003.19) that would have replaced the original POSIX.9 bindings
to Fortran 77.
From what I have read POSIX.9 draw some criticism and probably could
have been a lot better but the change to improve was simply dropped and
anyway IMHO it would have been better to have a not so nice binding than
nothing.
This all comes from what maybe can be called the philosophical view of
Fortran's future. Should it move more to the general purpose field?
Should it stay where it's niche is now (number-crunching) and improve on
it's solid base?
IMHO the second option is the best and that resources spent adding
system calls to Fortran would have been better spent on improving
Fortran's capabilities so it fits it's niche of application even better.
Well designed bindings to POSIX would have been a very nice add-on to
Fortran, drawing on the work done by other people and freeing scarce
resources from the need to reinvent the wheel (like the new command line
interface) making possible the addition of other features that IMHO are
more needed taking in account Fortran's "ecological niche".
Another advantage IMHO would have been that if some time in the future a
new interface to the system supplanted POSIX it would have been much
easier to make the change than it is to drop any language (mis)feature.
Best regards
José Rui
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